Since work zones are incredibly congested and vulnerable to a large number of accidents, they require extensive traffic control. That’s why work zone management has a hard time dealing with work zone security issues.
Traffic control police are responsible for this, and are often contacted by the work zone management. Work zones’ safety includes and should include protecting both the workers and the public.
There are usually two types of plans for keeping work zones safe:
- Temporary Traffic Control Plans
- Internal Traffic Control Plans
Let’s find out what these plans incorporate in the upcoming sections!
- Temporary Traffic Control Plans
The primary focus of temporary control plans is visual cues. These plans are designed to ensure appropriate and necessary guidance and visual cues to construction vehicles, workers, and the public.
Temporary control plans usually are designed in accordance with the activity area. They target a certain section of a highway or a certain part of the work zone at a time.
Usually, the activity areas are the ones where there is heavy traffic or which is a construction site full of heavy construction vehicles.
Apart from work zones, other temporary traffic control activity areas are:
- Traffic spaces
- Buffer spaces
- Incident management vehicle storage spaces
Temporary traffic control plans may include the following strategies in order to keep work zones safe:
- Facility closure in cases of emergency
- Maintenance of number of lanes by reducing shoulder and lane widths
- Segmenting work zone strategies
- Lane closure, when necessary
- Vehicle restrictions
- Emergency vehicle access
- Internal Traffic Control Plans
These are more specific and emergency-related plans. Internal traffic control plans assess and address hazards in work zones, especially in the activity areas.
The primary focus here is to avoid hazards and keep the work zone safe.
Following are the major goals of internal traffic control plans:
- Maintain safety at ingress and egress locations
- Provide contractors limited access points within the work zones
- Establish free areas within the work zones for public
- Make sure the work zone layout is appropriate
- Assess and evaluate which areas are acceleration and deceleration areas
- Build buffer spaces
- Provide and install appropriate flaggers and signs in appropriate areas throughout the work zone
- Monitor traffic, especially heavy traffic, such as construction vehicles
- Monitor non-compliant behavior and address it in a legally appropriate manner
- Reduce equipment back-ups
Conclusion
Work zones are incredibly hard to maintain, not just for the people who run them but for the traffic agencies as well. Every year thousands of accidents occur in work zones all across the world.
However, the safety of work zones can be enhanced with the help of traffic police and dedicated companies like Capital Traffic Management Solutions.
You can take help from Capital Traffic safety specialists as they believe in safety and have extensive plans laid out for their traffic control operations in work zones.
